Penelope Aubin (c. 1679-c. 1738) was an English novelist and translator. Her works include: The Stuarts: A Pindarique Ode (1707), The Extasy: A Pindarick Ode to Her Majesty The Queen (1708), The Strange Adventures of the Count de Vinevil and His Family (1721), The Life of Madam de Beaumount, A French Lady (1721), The Life and Amorous Adventures of Lucinda (1721), The Noble Slaves; or, The Lives and Adventures of Two Lords and Two Ladies (1722), History of Genghizcan the Great (1722), The Life of Charlotta du Pont, An English Lady (1723) and The Life and Adventures of the Lady Lucy (1726).

This is the first ever critical edition of Penelope Aubin’s The Noble Slaves, a novel that shows women as both moral exemplars and independent adventurers in foreign lands. Its tales of seduction, imprisonment, and escape engage with contemporary debates about arbitrary authority and slavery—particularly in relation to the lives of women. In one brief and fast-paced novel, Aubin brings together the aristocratic romance and the world of trade with the themes of empire and colonialism. Sometimes assessed as a pious conservative or a popular sensationalist, Aubin used fiction as a vehicle for addressing the deepest moral and political concerns of her time, and The Noble Slaves will allow new readers to understand her importance to the history of the novel. The appendices to this Broadview Edition include contemporary fiction and historical documents on slavery, piracy, and Orientalism.

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars. Rich in titles on English life and social history, this collection spans the world as it was known to eighteenth-century historians and explorers. Titles include a wealth of travel accounts and diaries, histories of nations from throughout the world, and maps and charts of a world that was still being discovered. Students of the War of American Independence will find fascinating accounts from the British side of conflict. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ Harvard University Houghton Library N003849 London: printed for A. Bettesworth, 1723. vi,282p.; 12°

The prose fiction of Penelope Aubin, including the two texts included in this edition—The Life of Madam de Beaumount (1721) and The Life of Charlotta Du Pont (1723), offers a delightful and provocative challenge to many of our standard ways of thinking about both the “rise of the novel” in eighteenth-century Britain and about women writers in that era. Aubin’s fast-paced highlights the persistence and vitality of romance as a form of storytelling, and the centrality of teenaged girls to tales that extend far beyond the domestic and amatory modes with which women writers have traditionally been associated. Aubin’s resourceful heroines and the often spectacular violence they engage in in order to defend their lives and bodily integrity against threats allow us a more expansive and exciting view of early eighteenth-century fiction than the current classroom canon often permits. In narratives spanning the globe and featuring pirates, North African corsairs, Jacobites, shipwrecks, and seraglios, Aubin delivers a form of fiction with roots that go back to antiquity and commitments that often feel far more modern than most other texts from the eighteenth century.